Google Fiber Is The Most Disruptive Thing The Company's Done Since Gmail

Google Fiber feels like the same leap of
innovation. It's been a long time since we saw anything like this
from the search and advertising giant.

Back when Gmail launched, the other free email providers like
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were offering less than
5MBof storage -- that's five
megabytes. Google trumped them all with 1GB of
free storage. With so much storage, there was no need to trash
anything. You could archive it and keep it forever.

Better yet, Gmail's search meant you could easily find any email
you wanted, even from years ago. There was no reason to put
things into different folders, use flags, or any of the other
tricks we used to keep track of mail on other platforms. Threaded
conversations, while hated by some, were nonetheless a new and
innovative way of keeping track of email chains with multiple
parties.

Google

Gmail also paved the way for Google's gradual move into business
apps -- most Google enterprise sales still lead with Gmail. Apps
is more of a nice but not entirely necessary add-on.

Google Fiber is like Gmail on many levels:

It exposes how slow the incumbents have been to
innovate. Google Fiber makes the cable-based ISPs
look pathetic. It promises to offer speeds up to 1,000Mbps
downstream and upstream, for only $70 a month. That's
theoretically fast enough to download a high-definition movie
in under a minute, although speeds could still be
constrained by bottlenecks on the distribution servers or
elsewhere in the network. Comcast's best home
package offers 50Mbps downstream and 10Mbps
downstream. All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free
storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month,
Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a
remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a
package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Google
even thumbed its nose at the incumbents with a slide showing
how slowly Internet access speed has been growing compared with
compute power and storage (see above) -- which is exactly what
one would expect to happen given the lack of competition most
broadband ISPs face in most parts of the country.

Google used its
hardware expertise. Google was able to get
prices so low, in part, because it designed and built all the
hardware for the system itself. This is a good reminder that
although Google wasn't a consumer electronics company until
recently, Google has actually been designing hardware for its
data centers for more than a decade. It was this data center
efficiency that allowed Gmail to offer way more free storage
than competitors back in 2004.

It paves the way for
new business areas. For Google, the main
business purpose of Fiber is to give people faster Internet
access, so they'll spend more time online -- where they're
more likely to use a Google product and click a Google-sold
ad. But just like Gmail unlocked an enterprise business,
Fiber could unlock a whole new business as an ISP and TV
provider. This isn't a loss leader -- Google CFO Patrick Pichette
said yesterday that Google intends to make money on
it.

This is what
Google products used to be like before they started chasing
Facebook with one social experiment
after another.